Skip to content

dcrd v1.3.0
Compare
Choose a tag to compare
@davecgh davecgh released this 19 Sep 15:30
· 2988 commits to master since this release
release-v1.3.0
This tag was signed with the committer’s verified signature.
davecgh Dave Collins
GPG key ID: B8904D9D9C93D1F2
Learn about vigilant mode.
0fe5649
This commit was signed with the committer’s verified signature.
davecgh Dave Collins
GPG key ID: B8904D9D9C93D1F2
Learn about vigilant mode.

This release of dcrd contains significant performance enhancements for startup
speed, validation, and network operations that directly benefit lightweight
clients, such as SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) wallets, a policy change
to reduce the default minimum transaction fee rate, a new public test network
version, removal of bloom filter support, infrastructure improvements, and other
quality assurance changes.

It is highly recommended that everyone upgrade to this latest release as it
contains many important scalability improvements and is required to be able to
use the new public test network.

Downgrade Warning

The database format in v1.3.0 is not compatible with previous versions of the
software. This only affects downgrades as users upgrading from previous
versions will see a one time database migration.

Once this migration has been completed, it will no longer be possible to
downgrade to a previous version of the software without having to delete the
database and redownload the chain.

Notable Changes

Reduction of Default Minimum Transaction Fee Rate Policy

The default setting for the policy which specifies the minimum transaction fee
rate that will be accepted and relayed to the rest of the network has been
reduced to 0.0001 DCR/kB (10,000 atoms/kB) from the previous value of 0.001
DCR/kB (100,000 atoms/kB).

Transactions should not attempt to use the reduced fee rate until the majority
of the network has upgraded to this release as otherwise the transactions will
likely have issues relaying through the network since old nodes that have not
updated their policy will reject them due to not paying a high enough fee.

Several Speed Optimizations

This release contains several enhancements to improve speed for startup,
the initial sync process, validation, and network operations.

In order to achieve these speedups, there is a one time database migration, as
previously mentioned, that typically only takes a few seconds to complete on
most hardware.

Further Improved Startup Speed

The startup time has been improved by roughly 2x on both slower hard disk drives
(HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs) as compared to v1.2.0.

Significantly Faster Network Operations

The ability to serve information to other peers on the network has received
several optimizations which, in addition to generally improving the overall
scalability and throughput of the network, also directly benefits SPV
(Simplified Payment Verification) clients by delivering the block headers they
require roughly 3x to 4x faster.

Signature Hash Calculation Optimization

Part of validating that transactions are only spending coins that the owner has
authorized involves ensuring the validity of cryptographic signatures. This
release provides a speedup of about 75% to a key portion of that validation
which results in a roughly 20% faster initial sync process.

Bloom Filters Removal

Bloom filters were deprecated as of the last release in favor of the more recent
privacy-preserving GCS committed filters. Consequently, this release removes
support for bloom filters completely. There are no known clients which use
bloom filters, however, if there are any unknown clients which use them, those
clients will need to be updated to use the GCS committed filters accordingly.

Public Test Network Version 3

The public test network has been reset and bumped to version 3. All of the new
consensus rules voted in by version 2 of the public test network have been
retained and are therefore active on the new version 3 test network without
having to vote them in again.

Changelog

All commits since the last release may be viewed on GitHub here.

Protocol and network:

Transaction relay (memory pool):

RPC:

dcrd command-line flags and configuration:

dcrctl utility changes:

Documentation:

Developer-related package and module changes:

Testing and Quality Assurance:

Misc:

Code Contributors (alphabetical order):

  • Dave Collins
  • David Hill
  • Dmitry Fedorov
  • Donald Adu-Poku
  • harzo
  • hypernoob
  • J Fixby
  • Jonathan Chappelow
  • Josh Rickmar
  • Markus Richter
  • matadormel
  • Matheus Degiovani
  • Michael Eze
  • Orthomind
  • Shuai Qi
  • Tibor Bősze
  • Victor Oliveira
Assets 2
Loading